The London G20 Summit

ONE members signed three petitions, two to Prime Minister Brown and one to President Obama, successfully encouraging these two key leaders to advocate for the world's poorest at the G20 Summit.

ONE delivered its petition with nearly 14,000 European ONE members' signatures to President Sarkozy's advisors in Brussels and Alain Joyandet, the French Minister for development. ONE members throughout Europe then directly emailed their finance ministers, sending over 6,000 emails in a few short weeks.

We expected leaders to have little time for development concerns at the one-day summit. However, thanks to the pressure from around the globe, the final communiqué included important initial commitments on resources, reform, and regulation for developing countries.

Resources: ONE called for an immediate US$50 billion stimulus package for sub-Saharan Africa, as well as for aid promises to be kept and "frontloaded". The G20 announced US$50bn for Low Income Countries as a whole. This would include:

• US$6 billion in lending raised by the sale of International Monetary Fund (IMF) gold reserves. This is a good start, but more can be done through further off-market gold sales for the poorest countries, to be brought forward at the Spring Meetings of the IMF and World Bank later this month in Washington, DC.

• Expansion of a "trade finance" package with money to get goods moving again.
A US$19 billion allocation of "Special Drawing Rights," or SDRs, to the poorest countries, approximately US$1 billion of which is for sub-Saharan Africa from a total global package of US$250 billion.

The deal also included an extra US$100 billion in lending from multilateral development banks. We need further clarification about how much of this will be available for the African Development Bank, which has urgent, immediate needs for unfunded infrastructure projects.

ONE is concerned that not enough resources were made available for the very poorest countries and that the resources are in the form of loans (therefore risking another debt crisis) or come with too many other conditions attached.

Reform: The G20 announced that developing countries would have greater representation in the international financial institutions, and that election to World Bank/IMF leadership would be based on merit. The latter is a welcome breakthrough if it means citizens of any country can apply.

Regulation: The G20 announced regulation of illicit tax havens. A litmus test of this initiative will be how many stolen assets are repatriated to developing countries as a result.

As with most major summit communiqués, there is a lack of detail in the G20's proposals. We must continue working hard to ensure that the G20's proposals deliver real results.